Grasping at Truth in the Time of COVID

“I have never yet been able to perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning — and yet it must be — “
— John Keats (from a letter to a friend, 22 November 1817)

I don’t know anyone who isn’t scared. If you’re lucky enough not to know someone who’s been killed by COVID-19, you’re still unlucky enough to have watched the death of your short- and middle-term plans, maybe your career ambitions. So far I’ve been relatively unharmed, but my fear has manifest as impatience with others, an inability to sleep through the night, and the endless revisiting of every financial decision I’ve made in the past two years. Why did I budget for this and not for that? I could have known. I should have known.

Knowing is the best defense against uncertainty. When ancient humans learned how to grow and store surplus food, they no longer had to wonder when they might find a meal. When they learned to pump water from the ground, the next rainfall ceased to be a source of anxiety. Knowledge saves us from uncertainty, and knowledge is what we’re missing most in our present situation.

Things we don’t know: Will post-COVID normalcy look anything like pre-COVID normalcy? What are the long-term effects of isolation, socially and economically? Why does the world grind to a halt for a virus and not for things like cancer and homelessness, which might kill more every year than unmitigated COVID? Who decided we were doing this? Who profits from it?

Some answers are straightforward. Suspiciously so. What’s the real reason for social distancing? Satellites, which, from the edge of space can only distinguish microchips that are at least six feet apart. The chips will be (or already are) inside us. Who makes them? Microsoft. (And/or any other tech giant.) Who implants them? Bill Gates, via his “philanthropic” work on vaccines, which is now focused on COVID–19. Or maybe via his plan to track who’s been vaccinated by injecting “near-infrared quantum dots.” Or via his work on mRNA medicine, which will “use synthetic biology to re-engineer humans at the molecular level,” according to one blogger. Folks are burning cell towers in Europe right now, fifty in the past month, because the new 5G technology is said variously to cause COVID–19 or to weaken immune systems and increase susceptibility to it. When catastrophe arrives, conspiracy theory is never far behind.

I was a conspiracist, once. As a teenager in the 1990s, I stumbled into the corner of the internet where the UFO fanatics hung out. These people had blurry but seemingly honest home videos showing lights moving strangely across the sky. They had documents (.TXTs, conveniently) detailing a government cover-up. They had “intel” on the ultra-secret Area 51, and the incident near Roswell in 1947. Whatever was aboard those UFOs was so world-changing the public wasn’t supposed to know about it. But I was part of a group that did.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of believing a conspiracy theory, you have to imagine it: the pieces clicking into place, the vertiginous thrill of The Truth emerging, the shadow of the villain looming over you. When you can focus your fear on a single object, it’s no longer a diffuse anxiety. Finally, you know what’s going on.

If you don’t crave this, you’re stronger than I am. Not that I give in to conspiracy theory anymore, but a part of me still wants to. I know why a person would choose to believe in a world manipulated by evil cabals: the alternative is a world in which inequality, poverty, starvation, disease and other forms of mass suffering are the result of billions of people simply doing their best with limited information and flawed psyches. I can’t fathom the full complexity (or tragedy) of the global situation. I don’t know if anyone can really stomach the deep uncertainty of the waters in which we drift. If knowing things is what makes us feel safe, a capricious world is a lot harder to swallow than a world explained by theory.

Here are the theories currently accepted by most people I know: the COVID-19 pandemic began in Wuhan, China in late December 2019. The virus arrived in the US six to eight weeks later. Its fatality rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of one or two percent. It spreads primarily through inhalation of droplets expelled when an infected person sneezes or coughs or talks loudly, but also through contact with a sneezed-on or coughed-on or talked-at surface. The practice of social distancing is now slowing the spread of the virus, and saving hospitals from being overwhelmed.

This is the story coming from most mainstream news outlets. And yet, if you’re read the news more than once in the past two months, you’ve seen the story change. COVID’s US arrival date has been revised backwards repeatedly. Early March became late February. Now it’s mid-January, and there’s no indication the revisions are done. Initial estimates of COVID’s fatality rate were close to three percent. Or, depending on what source you read and when you read it, below one percent. This range meant the disease might be inconveniently flu-like or appallingly dangerous. Data from the past few weeks show the measured rate for the US begin around 6% in February, drop below 1% in mid-March, and climb back up to its present rate of 5% [OurWorldInData.org]. Where will it go next? Projections of US deaths in the past month have gone from 90,000 (Apr 1) to 60,000 (Apr 15) to 67,000 (Apr 22) to 74,000 (Apr 28) [Reuters]. In the pre-COVID era there was already a crisis of fact. There were filter bubbles. Democrats and Republicans seemed to get their news from different planets. Now the contradictions aren’t just between FOX and the New York Times, but also intra-publication. The Times doesn’t agree with itself. The facts change in the course of a week.

But reality isn’t changing, it’s our estimates. Our view of the situation is based on extrapolations from a “paucity of data” from testing which, until very recently, has been “sparse” (in the words of a reputable doctor). From January until mid-March, only ten thousand tests for SARS-CoV-2 were conducted in the US, a country of 330 million. To accept that the first US cases were contracted in mid-January is to believe that the first people infected were also among the very first to be tested. This for a disease that spreads during the flu season, with flu-like symptoms, which for many is no worse than the flu.

New York, with more cases and fatalities than any other US state, has been trying hard to improve data quality. Officials recently set up antibody testing stations outside supermarkets in 19 counties. Three thousand people were tested. Governor Cuomo expected to see “the first true snapshot of exactly how many people were infected by COVID-19.” According to the snapshot, 21% of New York City and 14% of the state have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. If accurate, this puts the fatality rate at .6%, (16,600 deaths in a population of 27.5M). So the rate measured by this antibody study is just one tenth of the rate measured by direct testing. Because of the types of error associated with each method of measurement, we can surmise that the truth probably lies somewhere between. Six percent to six tenths of a percent: a factor of ten. That’s the chasm of uncertainty we’re in.

To believe in conspiracy theory is, when you come right down to it, lazy. The conspiracy theorist reverses the scientific process, interpreting each piece of evidence so it supports pre-existing conclusions. It’s a way to avoid complexity, and to avoid being proved wrong. (Note too the irony of conspiracy theory: that what masquerades as a fear of small groups with secret knowledge is really an excuse to enjoy being part of one.) But there’s something lazy about accepting the scientific narrative too. To question scientific findings has become, in the Trump era, tantamount to joining the flat-Earthers and religious nuts. The president’s popularity is, after all, based less on his party’s values than on his penchant for conspiracy theory (recall: “elites,” “rigged,” “birth certificate,” etc).

So defending the methods and values of science feels especially important right now. But those methods and values don’t instruct us to accept every finding as it comes. They instruct us to be skeptical, to ask how the evidence was gathered, filtered, and authorized as Fact. A Stanford University study of COVID antibody tests was recently discussed and rather harshly criticized by Columbia University researchers. No one was happy to find the errors, but someone pointed out: “if scientists are afraid to ‘police’ ourselves, I don’t know how we can ask the public to trust us.” [Columbia.edu]

Science is not the problem, it’s the lack of data. But, as of today, scientific methods cannot produce very good answers to important questions about the wisdom of our global response. Will we save lives today, only to lose them to homelessness, starvation, suicide, and the myriad poisons of economic collapse? In Sweden, a country were many schools and businesses have remained open due to social distancing rules that are largely voluntary, the country’s chief epidemiologist has said: “It is difficult to talk about the scientific basis of a strategy with these types of disease, because we do not know much about it and we are learning as we are doing, day by day.” [Nature.com] With Sweden’s “trust-based” approach, each citizen decides how to interpret the evidence and keep their community safe. Most polls have shown overwhelming support for the country’s plan. Numerically, as of today, the country is in the same inscrutable territory as the rest of us.

Most governments will continue to mandate behavior, relying on the best numbers available. And the quality of those numbers will gradually improve. On a personal level, most of us who reject conspiracy theory will rely on the science to insulate ourselves from uncertainty. But there’s another option, which comes not from a STEM pundit or conspiracist but a poet. John Keats observed, in Shakespeare and other artists, a certain quality he thought was essential to being a poet and a person: an ability to exist “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He called it negative capability.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, we know the facts are flawed. We know the coming economic pain is going to be (and in many cases already is) acute. But from a certain perspective, we’re lucky to be alive in these times. The grocery stores are selling delicious food, imported from all over the world. The yellow smear of sky above Los Angeles has vanished, the breathing is good, the neighborhood foliage is spectacular. I miss seeing people in person, I miss roaming widely and freely, and I’m terrified about money, but the experience of being a conscious human being right now is exactly as beautiful and as tragic as it’s always been. Negative capability isn’t anti-knowledge, it’s awareness of the limits of knowledge, and a caution against knowing about things as a substitute for experiencing them. The challenge posed by Keats, and maybe by COVID, is to hold everything lightly. To hear all opinions and abstain from conclusions. Uncertainty is a basic, unchangeable fact of life on Earth. To refuse the palliative of knowledge is a frightening prospect. In the coming months, it might also be the best way to stay sane.